The present invention generally relates to the embedded telecommunication environment and to the chassis solutions available in this environment.
Space is always a problem in the embedded telecommunication environment. Today's telecommunication engineering applications require the performance of a greater number of applications in less space, and these demands are continuing to increase. For example, greater densities, higher capacities, hot swapping capabilities and disk mirroring are being required in many applications. As a result, space is becoming a major engineering issue.
These requirements and others are stressing the capacity of available chassis solutions for telecommunication devices. Current chassis solutions do not provide the ability to increase the density of the electronics embedded in a chassis. They also do not adequately provide alarm systems that monitor the conditions of the telecommunication devices without sacrificing space normally used for the embedded electronics. Further, the available chassis solutions do not adequately provide dual power supplies to provide fault-tolerant operations.
Additionally, the low available density of embedded electronics and resulting inefficient use of space of current chassis solutions means that servicing such units often requires swapping out bulky and heavy chassis. Thus, chassis allowing higher density and resulting space efficiency to effectuate smaller field replaceable units (FRUs) are needed.
The density of electronics is limited by the ability to provide cooling of the electronics. Current chassis solutions do not efficiently provide cooling for the electronics located within the chassis, thereby limiting the capabilities existing chassis solutions. Accordingly, new telecommunication chassis solutions that provide adequate cooling are needed.